


oh sister, oh sister, let's walk the seashore

by slybrunette



Category: Lost
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-23
Updated: 2010-03-23
Packaged: 2017-10-09 00:32:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/81092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slybrunette/pseuds/slybrunette
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU. She says the Carolinas, she says New Jersey – for the ocean. He doesn't have it in him to say California, and so he just lets it speak for itself in his rearview mirror (this is a story without an ending; or maybe it's already over).</p>
            </blockquote>





	oh sister, oh sister, let's walk the seashore

They're on I-70, just past Junction City, when he tries again.

"We could stop." The sun's high in the sky and he left his sunglasses somewhere in Nevada; the glare is getting to him and his eyes are bloodshot from all the hours he didn't sleep last night. He's not tired. Or he is and he's just forgotten what it feels like to not be. "For lunch. Or something."

There's been exit signs, brightly colored blocks advertising food, gas, and lodging, for miles now – not to mention various landmarks and places of interest spelled out in bold white letters – and she hasn't so much as shown evidence that she can still read. Twice he's touched her, first a heavy hand on her shoulder, the next his fingers intertwining with hers, and the only response he's gotten out of her is wide blue eyes fixed on him in a way that made him wish he'd never made the move in the first place.

"Do you think we'll get to Missouri today?" Claire asks the window.

A handful of words, and whether they're a response to his own or not, it's still progress. There's a map he purchased in his visor, worn out at the folds already, but he's got a truck a few car lengths in front of him that's driving is fairly erratic and he isn't willing to take the risk. Jack answers honestly, "I don't know."

"I've never been there," she exhales; the window fogs.

He knows. She's never been east of where they are now, or north, or south. This is her very own tour of the continental US outside of California. Except he doesn't know why. "What's on the East Coast?"

"Hmm?"

"The East Coast. You told me to drive east."

Blue eyes are back on him again, and he supposes it's only fitting considering her next words are, "the ocean."

The truck in front of them takes the next exit, leaving them with open road, and it takes exactly that long for him to finally say, "There's an ocean in California."

"I know," she replies, her voice coming to life in the worst way. It sounds like she's in on some joke that he's missing, has been missing from the start, and it bothers him just enough that he doesn't ask.

They don't make it to Missouri.

 

 

-

 

 

"I always wanted to travel," she said, day five in a hotel room that had too many windows and not enough furniture. Airy was the best way he could think to describe it. The shirt she wore wasn't hers, and it wasn't his, and it didn't fit her either. Too long, too loose, and too garish against pale skin.

Her eyes had lit up and he would've done anything to keep them that way. So he said, "The airport – "

"No," she grimaced. He wondered if it was the prospect of planes. He wondered if it mattered. "We should drive. Do it the right way." He doesn't think that there's really a right way but he holds his tongue. "All the way to the Carolinas or New Jersey. The other side of the country. We could do it."

Usually, when people talked about the East Coast, it was big cities – New York City, D.C., Boston – but there wasn't any common denominator between the states she'd mentioned other than latitudinal similarity.

That neither here nor there. Jack had finally surfaced from two and a half days spent in some variation of a drunken haze a week ago and his irritation with the bright lights and the constant breeze from the windows was something he was trying to pass off as a kind of detoxing. Maybe the travel, the feeling of progress, of having purpose and an objective, might make it all easier.

He nodded. "Yeah. Yeah we could."

 

 

-

 

 

They don't talk about it.

They say "back there", if they absolutely have to. Words like 'island' are off limits. There's a list somewhere, that exists in both of their minds if nowhere else.

She spread her legs on the powder blue bedspread, with him in between them and her skirt hiked up along her hips. His hands drifted to rest on her thighs, thumbs brushing against the inside of them in a way that might've made her shiver.

Claire kissed his jaw, day old stubble, and then asked, "Do you think about them?"

The faces that flash behind his eyelids act as the equivalent to a cold shower. He pulls his hands away like he's been burned.

"I dream about them," she adds, as if nothing has changed, kisses the corner of his mouth and he stiffens.

The sound of church bells floats in through the damn open windows, except there's no church for miles and it's late afternoon.

She exhales, forehead against him and his hand still slips absentmindedly through her hair.

 

 

-

 

In Tennessee, she goes for a walk while he's in the shower and doesn't come back for over an hour.

Her knees are scratched and bloody; she says she found some woods, caught on the brush. There is no emotion in her voice, nor in her face, when she says it, but that's been par for the course for a long while now.

She perches on the edge of the bathtub in their motel room, and he grabs antiseptic and some bandages and cleans them off with a washcloth. If it stings, she doesn't wince.

"What were you doing?" He asks; she watches the clock on the wall from underneath thick eyelashes.

"I told you. I went for a walk." Jack means for an explanation, of course, but pushing her just ends with him coming up against a brick wall each and every time, so he only nods. She switches topics anyways. "He was from here, you know."

He thinks, simple inference, deduction, but he comes up empty. "I don't know who you're talking about."

It's the first time her eyes really fix on his all day.

(Jack lives for these moments, you know, the moments where her eyes are clear and there's some substance to her voice. The moments where she's more than just tangible. She's there. There's someone in there who bears more than just a passing resemblance to a woman he used to know).

"Sawyer." Her lips pull up at the corners. It's not something to be smiling about. He doesn't frown in spite of that. "How could you forget that?"

"I don't know." There really aren't a lot of excuses; it was a well-known fact. "I guess it's just easier that way."

Now there's a laugh that escapes. "When have you ever been about what's easier?"

He has no answer for that either.

 

 

-

 

 

Later:

"I thought I saw him."

This time, the him in question needs no explanation.

"Out there, I thought I saw him."

Her eyes are vacant when he looks over at her. He kisses her forehead and tells her to go to sleep.

 

 

-

 

 

In the morning, they stop at the drugstore next to the 7-Eleven (the coffee is cheap, never mind the consistency). He grabs Excedrin and comes out of aisle six to find her toying with a pair of sunglasses.

"They look just like your old ones," she replies, before he can even ask the question, handing them to him before venturing down the next aisle.

(The skies open midafternoon and it pours for the rest of the day).

 

 

-

 

It wasn't just the drinking.

It wasn't just a two day binge either.

It was pills, it was constant, one after the other – or along with the other. It was whole days that he lost, and whole nights that he wished he had.

But he got clean for her, you know.

It was all for her.

 

 

-

 

They're in Nag's Head the following day.

It's the middle of spring but the temperatures have cooled and she wraps herself in a thin sweater when she steps out into the sand. The wind whips through her hair, sending a whirl of blonde waves flowing out behind her like a cape. The ocean looks cerulean from a distance, footprints in the sand disappearing towards the shore, where the water has erased them.

There's no one else out here. It's the plunging temperatures, the ever present threat of rain. His car is parked a few miles back and there are umbrellas somewhere, shoved under the seat, under suitcases and various bags. She'd shook her head when he mentioned them, and then started off without him.

"It's beautiful," he says, but doesn't so much mean it. You can only spend so much time on an island before the beauty of the ocean, nothing but blue water and blue sky, begins to be lost on you completely. Other people would say it's beautiful, much in the way that other people would remark on how they should make a trip to Kill Devil Hills while they're there, talk about the miracle of flight and it's origins.

Eleven miles of oceanfront in this place alone, and she turns – barefoot in the sand as the wind dies down momentarily – and says, "This isn't it."

He frowns. "What?"

Claire heard him. He can tell by the way her arms cross over her chest as she walks past him, back the way they came. "This isn't it," she repeats.

 

 

-

 

 

"What did you mean?"

She butterflies the spine of the book she's been flipping through, left here by whoever had the room last. He sits on the bed across from her. Two doubles. It was intentional, though he isn't sure why he's climbing atop that particular moral high ground now.

"What did you mean back there?"

"It doesn't all have to mean something," she replies, sounding as irritated as he could remember her ever being this whole trip, "this isn't the island. Not everything a puzzle for you to solve."

There's a hurried quality to her movements as she abandons her book and shuts herself in the bathroom, leaving him stunned and alone in the silent room, listening to the water run through the wall.

("Get a clue," someone wiser than him might've said, "get a clue, Jack."

But most of those people were buried in the dirt thousands of miles away, without even the crosses that used to mark their graves – they'd burned it all down, metaphorically, literally, every sense.

It's following her advice that got him in the end, anyways).

 

 

-

 

They eat lunch in somewhere in Old Town. Virginia. King St. is full of pedestrians, lunch rush, and the second story offers them a view that neither of them bothers much with.

"We'll be in New Jersey tomorrow," he tells her. The tines of her fork clang against her plate but she hasn't let go. "Probably before sunset."

He thinks it might make her smile. She's been relatively cold since the hotel room in Nags Head. Claire just chews her food quietly and looks at the painting on the wall behind him, eyes above his head and not at all trying to give the impression that she's looking at him.

"Point Pleasant's nice," Jack continues, for lack of anything else to fill the dead air, "I went there once with some college buddies of mine. When I was at Columbia."

She crosses her legs underneath the table and her foot brushes his leg in the process. He tenses. "That's nice," she says, but it sounds like nothing more than an echo.

 

-

 

It's late when they get there. Traffic jam on I-95, back in Maryland, and the radio played more commercials then they did music and kept cutting in with traffic reports to let them know both what they could see with their own eyes and what they didn't care about.

He still didn't turn it off.

They stay in one of those rentals almost right on the beach but don't venture out to it. She lays tomorrow's clothes out on her bed with a strange precision while he heads out, tells her he's going to the drugstore, but goes to the nearest liquor store instead.

She's already in bed when he comes back, the displacement of the sheets from her tossing and turning letting him know that she's naked underneath clean linen. He climbs in with her and her eyes flutter open the second the bed shifts.

(When she comes, it's with his name whispered, close enough to his ear that it seems to vibrate through him – it's the first and the last time).

 

-

 

It happens in the morning.

He makes coffee in the small kitchen, windows facing out to the beach, and he hears the door close. Jack doesn't make anything of it, tries to find the coffee filters instead, and by the time he's pressed 'on' and the machine gurgles, she's down to where the water meets the sand, just dipping her toes in. Her white skirt billows at her ankles.

It's the same scene from North Carolina, reproduced on a different beach, and he leaves the coffee to percolate and follows the same path she took.

The sun has just risen and there's no one else on this particular part of the beach, and so he thinks nothing of calling out, "Everything okay?"

When she turns to him, this time, there's a smile stretched across her face. "This is it," she says, with bright eyes, full of life. "This is it."

Other men than him, smarter ones, would've known to shut up and enjoy the view. But Jack still has questions. Always had. "Why is this place different, Claire? Why here?"

Her smile doesn't fade. "The ocean, silly," she replies, and whatever else she might have said gets lost to the crashing waves.

 

-

 

He goes back inside.

She doesn't.

He's pouring coffee into a mug, chances a glance out the window again, and that's when he sees it.

Claire, chest-deep in the water, sinking further in with each deliberate, measured step.

Jack tears out of the house, shouting her name all the way, but by the time he hits the water, she's already gone.

 

 

-

 

 

Her clothes are still on the bed.

The white skirt is fanned out over her pillows.

(This is where it all starts to sink in).

 

-

 

 

Jack Shephard dies in a head-on collision on I-70, just past Junction City, KS.

He is believed to be the last survivor of the downed Oceanic Flight 815.

There were no other passengers.

 

 

-

 

(They never made it to Missouri).

 

-

 

_fin_


End file.
